DATA SCIENCE

What is Data Science? 

Data science continues to evolve as one of the most promising and in-demand career paths for skilled professionals. Today, successful data professionals understand that they must advance past the traditional skills of analyzing large amounts of data, data mining, and programming skills. In order to uncover useful intelligence for their organizations, data scientists must master the full spectrum of the data science life cycle and possess a level of flexibility and understanding to maximize returns at each phase of the process. 

Therefore, Data science in simple words can be defined as an interdisciplinary field of study that uses data for various research and reporting purposes to derive insights and meaning out of that data. Data science requires a mix of different skills including statistics, business acumen, computer science, and more.

The Data Science Life Cycle:

The image represents the five stages of the data science life cycle: 

Capture, (data acquisition, data entry, signal reception, data extraction); 

Maintain (data warehousing, data cleansing, data staging, data processing, data architecture); 

Process (data mining, clustering/classification, data modeling, data summarization); 

Analyze (exploratory/confirmatory, predictive analysis, regression, text mining, qualitative analysis); Communicate (data reporting, data visualization, business intelligence, decision making).

So why do businesses need Data Science? 

We have come a long way from working with small sets of structured data to large mines of unstructured and semi-structured data coming in from various sources. The traditional Business Intelligence tools fall short when it comes to processing this massive pool of unstructured data. Hence, Data Science comes with more advanced tools to work on large volumes of data coming from different types of sources such as financial logs, multimedia files, marketing forms, sensors and instruments, and text files.

What are the applications of Data Science?

Now who studies Data science? A Data Scientist.

So who is a Data Scientist and what is their work?

A data scientist identifies important questions, collects relevant data from various sources, stores and organizes data, decipher useful information, and finally translates it into business solutions and communicate the findings to affect the business positively. Apart from building complex quantitative algorithms and synthesizing a large volume of information, the data scientists are also experienced in communication and leadership skills, which are necessary to drive measurable and tangible results to various business stakeholders.

References : https://www.oracle.com/in/data-science/what-is-data-science/, https://www.datarobot.com/wiki/data-science/
Images : Google (https://www.sharda.ac.in/blog/decoding-the-role-of-data-science-and-data-scientist/, https://careerkarma.com/careers/data-science/)

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